Shadow and Betrayal

Heshai did.’
    ‘And why,’ Maati said, ‘are you telling me this?’
    ‘That’s a question,’ Seedless said. ‘It’s the first one you’ve asked me tonight. If I answer, you have to pay my price. Accept my apology.’
    Maati considered the dark, eager eyes and then laughed.
    ‘You tell a good monster story,’ Maati said, ‘but no. I think I’ll live with my curiosity intact.’
    A sudden scowl marked Seedless’ face, but then he laughed and took a pose appropriate to the loser of a competition congratulating the victor. Maati found that he was laughing with him and rose, responding with a pose of gracious acceptance. As he walked up the stairs toward his bed, Seedless called out after him.
    ‘Heshai won’t ever invite you along with him. But he won’t turn you away if you come. The Khai is holding a great audience after temple next week. You should come then.’
    ‘I can’t think of any reason, Seedless-cha, to do your bidding.’
    ‘You shouldn’t,’ the andat said, and an odd melancholy was in his voice. ‘You should always do only your own. But I’d like to see you there. We monsters have few enough people to talk with. And whether you believe me or not, I would be your friend. For the moment, at least. While we still have the option.’
     
    She had grown complacent; she saw that now. As a girl or a younger woman, Amat had known that the city couldn’t be trusted. Fortunes changed quickly when she was low and poor. A sickness or a wound, an unlucky meeting - anything could change how she earned her money, where she lived, who she was. Working for so many years and watching her station rise along with the house she served, she had forgotten that. She hadn’t been prepared.
    Her first impulse had been to go to friends, but she found she had fewer than she’d thought. And anyone she knew well enough to trust with this, the moon-faced Oshai and his knife-man might also know of. For the past three days she’d slept in the attic of a wineseller with whom she’d had an affair when they’d both been young. He had already been married to his wife at the time - the same woman who Amat heard moving through the house below her now. No one had known then, and so no one was likely to guess now.
    The room, if it could be called that, was low and dark. Amat couldn’t sit without her head brushing the roof. The scent of her own shit leaked from the covered night pot; it couldn’t be taken away until after nightfall when the household slept. And just above her, unseen sunlight baked the rooftiles until the ceiling was too hot to touch comfortably. Amat lay on the rough straw mat, torpid and miserable, and tried not to make noises that would give her presence away.
    She did not dream, but her mind caught a path and circled through it over and over in way that also wasn’t the stuff of waking. Marchat had been forced somehow to take House Wilsin into the sad trade. And, abominably, against a woman who had been tricked. The girl had been lied to and brought here, to Saraykeht, so that the andat could pull her baby out of her womb. Why? What child could be so important? Perhaps it was really the get of some king of the eastern islands, and the girl didn’t guess whose child she really carried, and . . .
    No. There was no reason to bring her here. There were any number of ways to be rid of a child besides the andat. Begin again.
    Perhaps the woman herself wasn’t what she seemed. Perhaps she was mad, but also somehow precious. Normal teas might derange her, so the andat was employed to remove the babe without putting any medicines into the woman. And House Wilsin . . .
    No. If there had been a reason, a real reason, a humane reason, for this travesty, Marchat wouldn’t have had to keep it from her. Begin again.
    It wasn’t about the woman. Or the father. Or the child. Marchat had said as much. They were all nobodies. The only things left were House Wilsin and the andat. So the solution was there. If there was a solution. If this wasn’t all a fever dream. Perhaps House Wilsin intended to kill out an innocent child with the aid of the Khai and then use their shared guilt as a way to gain favor . . .
    Amat ground her palms into her eyelids until blotches of green and gold shone before her. Her robes, sweat-sticky, balled and bound like bedclothes knotted in sleep. In the house below her, someone was pounding something - wood clacking against wood. If she’d been somewhere cool enough to think, if